The Practice of Managerial Leadership

By Nancy R. Lee

The Practice of Managerial Leadership describes a total system for managing organizations. This practical system is made up of a integrated set of principles, practices and procedures. The concepts in the system are logical and consistent and have been developed over 50 years by Dr. Elliott Jaques and his colleagues in 15 countries, through continuing consulting research work in organizations. Dr. Jaques called this system Requisite Organization. He chose the term requisite to describe this integrated theory of how organizations work best because requisite means as required by the nature of things. The ideas contained in Requisite Organization theory and practice flow from the nature of thingsthe nature of people, the nature of work and the nature of the relationship between the two. Nancy Lee worked with Dr. Jaques for more than two decades and he edited the material in this book for accuracy in providing a detailed description of Requisite Organization. Managerial hierarchies exist to get work done in order to achieve their goals. Achieving these goals requires an organization that is appropriately structured, competent individuals at each organizational level, and procedures and practices that facilitate the work. This book deals with organizations that employ peoplemanagerial hierarchies where accountability is delegated through the organization from the owners/board members. People are employed within these managerial hierarchies as individuals (not as teams or as partners) to do the work required.

The material in the book is largely focused on the role of the manager because that is where most of the guidelines are needed in order to accomplish the work of the organization. It is the work of managers that determines the results achieved with the available resources. Requisite practices enable decisive, accountable, value-adding managerial leadership throughout the organization. There is also information on the roles and accountabilities of non-managerial subordinates. Each employee needs to understand fully his or her own role and the organizations structure and practices. All of the principles in Requisite Organization are intended to enhance trust between employees in the organization and employees and the organization.

Trust and understanding are further enhanced in Requisite Organization by the explicit definition of commonly used business terms such as work. role and manager that are generally ill- defined and ambiguous. Describing requisite practices and procedures in a consistent language that everyone understands provides clarity about what should be done and how to do it. The book contains a glossary defining important words and concepts used in managerial work.

This book is written for managers in all types of managerial hierarchies including commercial, not-for-profit and governmental. The ideas are equally useful for managers at all levels in organizations. The principles and practices about managerial leadership described in detail in this book have been tested and put into practice in organizations throughout the world.

This book introduces the material contained in Dr. Jaques' books, Social Power and the CEO and Requisite Organization: A Total System for Effective Managerial Organization and Managerial Leadership for the 21st Century, as well as his series of video tapes about Requisite Organization. The chapters in this book are organized in a manner similar to the videotapes so that they can be used together, if desired. The videotapes can be ordered from Cason Hall Publishers at 800-448-7357.

Chapter One describes the Basic Concepts of Requisite Organization. Chapter Two deals with Human Capability, Chapter Three describes Working Relationships and Chapter Four discusses the Organization Structure required to establish work and functions at the right level in the organization and Chapter Five describes

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 18, 2007
• ISBN: 9781465315816

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Copyright © 2007 by Nancy R. Lee.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2006909620

ISBN:                Hardcover                  978-1-4257-4142-6

                          Softcover                     978-1-4257-4141-9

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Rev. date: 12/06/2017

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction to The Practice of Managerial Leadership

Chapter 1:   Basic Concepts

Associations and Managerial Hierarchies

Associations

Employment Organizations

The Managerial Hierarchy

Definitions of Manager, Accountability and Strata

Manager

Accountability

Strata

Other Types of Associations

Partnerships

Churches

Colleges and Universities

Doctors and Hospitals

Government Organizations

Family-owned Companies

Understanding the Differences

Purpose of Requisite Organization Theory

Organizations are Systems with Process and Structure

Organization Structure (Roles and Role Relationships)

Organization Processes (Practices and Procedures)

The Manager-Subordinate Working Relationship

Managerial Authority

Veto Appointment

Decide on Removal from Role

Assign Tasks

Appraisal and Merit Increase

Leadership

Managerial Leadership

Misconceptions about Managerial Work

Subordinate Accountability and Authority

Individual Contributors

Time Span and Organizational Layers (Strata)

Definitions of Work, Task and Role

Work

Task

Quantity (Q)

Quality (Q)

Resources (R)

Time (T)

Policies and Procedures

QQT/R

Context Setting

Level of Work and Time Span of Discretion

Level of Work

Time Span of Discretion

Time Span in Multiple-Task Roles

Time Span in Single-Task Roles

Origins of Time-Span Measurement

The Requisite Pattern of Organizational Structure

The Requisite Strata Required

Role Complexity and Task Complexity

Role Complexity

Task Complexity

Stratum I Complexity

Stratum II Complexity

Stratum III Complexity

Stratum IV Complexity

Stratum V Complexity

Stratum VI Complexity

Stratum VII Complexity

Stratum VIII Complexity

Orders of Complexity

Chapter 2:   Human Capability

The Nature of Human Capability Applied to Work

Potential Capability and Applied Capability

Potential Capability

Applied Capability

Values

Skilled Knowledge

Complexity of Information Processing

Suitability for a Role

Decision Making

Other Measures of Ability

Personality Characteristics

Negative Temperament

The Maturation of the Complexity of Information Processing

Development and Maturation

Fairness in Employment

Complexity of Information Processing and Organization Strata

Declarative Processing

Cumulative Processing

Serial Processing

Parallel Processing

Orders of Complexity of Information Processing

Childhood Order of Information Complexity—Tangibles

Symbolic Verbal Order of Information Complexity

Abstract Conceptual Order of Information Complexity

Universal Order of Information Complexity

Research in the Complexity of Information Processing

Chapter 3:   Working Relationships

The Task Assigning Role Relationship Between Manager and Subordinate

Managerial Planning

Setting Context

The Context Trio

Task, Work and Role

Specifying Tasks

Outputs have Value

How Far Down to Delegate

Manager’s Integration of the Unit’s Functions

Types of Delegated Tasks

Direct Output

Delegated Direct Output

Direct Output Support and Aided Direct Output

Individual Contributors and ADO/DOS

Teams and Team Working

Project Teams

Project Team Leaders

Project Team Members

Project Team Output

Coordinative Teams

Managerial Teams

No Team Decisions

Cross-Functional Working Relationships

Cross-Functional Relationships Exist Between Roles

Establishing Cross-Functional Working Relationships

Exploring CFWRs

The Seven Cross-Functional Working Relationships

Collateral Relationship

Advisory Relationship

Monitoring Relationship

Auditing Relationship

Prescribing Relationship

Service Relationship

Coordinative Relationship

Collateral Accountability and Authority

Advisory Accountability and Authority

Monitoring Accountability and Authority

Auditing Accountability and Authority

Prescribing Accountability and Authority

Service Accountability and Authority

Coordinative Accountability and Authority

Summary of Cross-Functional Working Relationships

The Role of the Manager-once-Removed

Assign SoR Roles

Decide SoR Cross-Functional Working Relationships

Talent Pool Development and Succession Planning

Individual Development

Transfer Decisions

Deselection and Dismissal with Cause

Provision for Appeal

Equilibration

Ensure Effective Managerial Leadership

Three-Level Managerial Team Working

Chapter 4:   Organization Structure & Functional Alignment

Functions in an Organization

Business Units

Stratum VII Corporations

Corporate Operations Vice Presidents

Corporate Development Officers

New Ventures

Corporate Services

Headquarter Strategic Staff Functions

Corporate Chief Financial Officer

Human Resources Specialist

Technology Advisor

Public Affairs

General Corporate Counsel

Stratum V Business Units & Roles

Stratum V Mainstream Business Functions

Production and Procurement

Marketing and Selling

Product/Service Development

Business Unit Services

Resource Sustainment Services

Financial Auditing and Services

General Services

Repair and Maintenance Services

Stratum V Staff Specialist Functions

Business Programming Specialist

Human Resource Specialist

Technology Specialist

Resource Enhancement

Stratum IV General Managers

Stratum III Mutual Recognition Units (MRUs)

MRU Specialist Staff

First Line Units

Three Common Problems Found in First Line Units

Addressing These Problems Requisitely

Establish Stratum II First Line Manager Roles

Institute Requisite Management Practices

The First Line Manager Role

Examine the Current Situation

Multiple Layers between the Manager and the First Line Worker

Clarifying the First Line Manager Role

Span of Control

Providing Assistance to the First Line Manager

First Line Manager Assistants

Specialist Operators in Part-time Support Roles

Involvement of Stratum III Managers

The Stratum III Mutual Recognition Unit

Stratum IV General or Functional Manager

Selecting First Line Managers

Special Circumstances in First Line Units

Trade Unions

Multiple Shifts

First Line Shifts

One First Line Manager Accountable for all Shifts in an Area

Managing Multiple Shifts

Subordinates Can Often Direct Their Own Work on Shifts

Handling Serious Problems on Shifts

Self-Managed Teams are not Appropriate

Determining the Requisite Structure for Shifts

Benefits of Establishing Requisite First line Units

Chapter 5:   Management Practices

Organizational Leadership Practices

Communicating the Vision

Corporate Culture

Corporate Values

Society’s Values

Private Values

Management Leadership Practices for All Managers

Managerial Accountability

Minimum Managerial Authority

Essential Management Practices

Coaching

Purposes of Coaching

Counseling

Coaching Triggers

Person New to the Role

Progress Toward Achieving Assigned Tasks

The Need to Strengthen Existing Skills and Knowledge

Readiness for Development within Current Role

Specific Difficulties

Effective Managerial Coaching

MoR’s Role in the Coaching Process

Personal Effectiveness Appraisal

Performance Appraisal and Personal Effectiveness

Purposes of the Personal Effectiveness Appraisal System

Applied Capability

Appraisal as a Continuing Process

Employees’ Personal Effectiveness Accountabilities

Equilibration, the MoR’s Role in Appraisal

Merit Review

Selection

The Selection Process

Specifying the Role

Human Resources Recommends a Full Slate to the MoR

Internal and External Candidates

MoR Develops Short List

The Immediate Manager Chooses from Short List

Induction

Deselection and Dismissal with Cause

Deselection

Dismissal with Cause

Managerial Meetings

Information Sharing Meetings

Idea Generation Meetings

Managerial Decision Making

Continual Improvement

Steps in Continual Improvement

Hold Managers Accountable for Continual Improvement

Maintain an Ongoing Analysis

Continual Improvement Priority List

Staff Specialists Provide Assistance

Continual Improvement Project Teams

Continual Improvement on the Shop Floor

Continuous Systems Improvement

Continual Improvement at Every Level

Chapter 6:   The Novus Story

Background on Monsanto and Novus

A New Beginning using Requisite Principles and Practices

Educating Senior Management

Analyzing the Extant Organization

Stratum VI Organizations

Initial Judgments of Employees’ Complexity of Information Processing

Addressing Issues of Temperament

Examining Cross-Functional Working Relationships

Developing Requisite Processes for Novus

Key Accountabilities Document (KAD)

Personal Effectiveness Appraisal (PEA)

Educating Employees about the Novus Management System

Other Requisite Practices

Level of Work and Organization Structure

Compensation

Talent Pool Development

Embedding the Novus Management System

Thoughts about the Novus Project

Novus in the 21st Century

Chapter 7:   The Roche Canada Story

Background

Roche Canada Prepares for the 21st Century

Organizing To Deliver Roche Strategy

Vertical Organization Alignment

Functional Organization Alignment

Establishing Better Cross-Functional Working Relationships

Establishing High-Performance Product Development and Launch Teams

Assessing the Talent Pool and Communicating the Results

Managerial Leadership Training

Requisite Rewards and Recognition

The Requisite Principles and Roche Strategic Planning

Lessons Learned at Roche Canada

Summary

Glossary

This book is dedicated to

Elliott Jaques,

friend, mentor, visionary.

Acknowledgments

I appreciate the time Elliott Jaques spent editing this material so that it accurately represents his ideas in a linear, simplified form.

I also want to thank my many colleagues and clients who have helped me to understand, explain and utilize Elliott’s concepts, especially Charlotte Bygrave, Sandi Cardillo, Kathryn Cason, Rod Carnegie, Ken Craddock, Sue Croft, Carol Dolan, Betsi English, Linda Gloe, Sabrena Hamilton, Tim Hart, Janet Kelly, Fred Mackenzie, Fran Marshall, Joe Privott, Susan Schmitt, Terry Seigel, Thad Simons, Betsy Watson, Tova White and Ken Wright.

Nancy Lee

Longboat Key, Florida

2006

Preface

Shortly after he returned from his service as a psychiatrist in the Canadian Army in World War II, Elliott Jaques became one of a pioneering group of psychiatrists and psychologists at the Tavistock Institute in London. Their military experience led them into innovations in organizations.

Jacques was consulting in the Glacier Metals Company when an employee asked him why it was that workers like him were paid by the hour while the executives drew an annual salary. That question aroused Jaques’ curiosity and led him to start investigating the possible replies. His search led to a 50-year creative quest that became a major re-thinking of human capability and organizational structure.

Jaques’ investigation took him into many parts of the world. A major learning experience was his consultation with Rio Tinto Zinc, a mining company in Australia. The chief executive of that company, Rod Carnegie, quickly grasped the import of Jaques’ inquiry. Together they fostered extensive consultation in that company which resulted in a systematic refinement of Jaques’ thinking and the profitable reorganization of that giant mining company.

Meanwhile he was also consulting with private and governmental organizations in Great Britain and did extensive work with the United States Army. Together these efforts, his writings, and the stimulation of working with companies in different countries fostered his conceptualization of human effort in organizations.

His thinking was a monumental reformulation of the basis of human capacity and organizational structure, reflected in twenty books and scores of articles.

Jaques not only posited eight different levels of conceptual thinking among human beings but also elaborated the curves of that thinking over an adult lifetime. In turn, his conceptualization gave rise to a new logic for organizational structure, an area that had previously had no logic for organizational leadership and accountability.

His work early on aroused my own curiosity and I invited him to join me in weeklong seminars I was conducting for the Levinson Institute. I also introduced him to several of the companies I was working with in the United States and South America. Executives quickly discovered his sophistication about their organizational lives. However, it soon became apparent that their re-thinking would have to go beyond slogans, clichés and traditional practices to become familiar with Jaques’ formulations. Once they grasped his creative logic, they recognized that his thinking was far beyond what was in the management textbooks.

Jaques, with the help of his wife, Kathryn Cason, and the author of this book, Nancy Lee, continued to refine his thinking about levels of conceptual ability and even began to extend his thinking to understanding how animals differed in their capacity to grasp complexity.

Because his work required his audiences and his readers to make a radical change in their customary thinking about organizations and managers, many were reluctant to undertake that change for themselves and others and gave up on the possibility of introducing his concepts into their organizations.

In short, Jaques’ work requires readers to take the necessary time to grasp his innovation. It also requires radical change in how executives are chosen and companies are organized. Like all new thinking his work necessitates testing the applications in one’s own organization.

But grasping complexity need not be an overwhelming task. In this book Nancy Lee, herself an organizational consultant long immersed in Jaques’ conceptualization efforts, has made his thinking much easier to grasp. That, in turn, should make this volume highly useful to executives, consultants and graduate students who seek to make organizations more effective.

Harry Levinson, Ph.D.

Chairman Emeritus, The Levinson Institute

Emeritus Harvard Medical School, Clinical Professor of Psychology

Introduction to The Practice

of Managerial Leadership

The material in this book describes the comprehensive set of concepts, principles, practices and procedures for the practice of managerial leadership called Requisite Organization. These ideas are logical and consistent and have been developed over more than 55 years by Dr. Elliott Jaques and his colleagues in 15 countries. The ideas have been tested and put into practice throughout the world through continuing consulting research work.

Dr. Jaques chose the term ‘requisite’ to describe this integrated theory of how organizations work best because requisite means ‘as required by the nature of things’. The ideas contained in Requisite Organization theory and practice flow from the nature of things—the nature of people, the nature of work and the nature of the relationship between the two.

Organizations exist to get work done in order to achieve their goals. Achieving organizational goals requires an organization that is appropriately structured, competent individuals at each organizational level, and procedures and practices that facilitate the work. This book deals with organizations that employ people—managerial hierarchies where accountability is delegated down through the organization from the owners/board members. People are employed within these managerial hierarchies as individuals (not as teams or as partners) to do the work required.

The material that follows is largely focused on the role of the manager because that is where most of the guidelines are needed in order to accomplish the goals of the organization. It is the work of managers that determines the results achieved with the available resources. Requisite practices enable decisive, accountable, value-adding managerial leadership throughout the organization. There is also information on the roles and accountabilities of non-managerial subordinates. Each employee needs to understand fully his or her own role and the organization’s structure and practices. All of the principles in Requisite Organization are intended to enhance trust between employees in the organization and between employees and the organization.

Trust and understanding are further enhanced in Requisite Organization by the explicit definition of commonly used business terms. These terms are generally ill-defined and ambiguous. Clearly describing requisite practices and procedures in a consistent language that everyone understands provides clarity about what should be done and how to do it.

This book is written for managers at all levels in organizations. It is meant to introduce the material contained in Dr. Jaques’ books, Social Power and the CEO and Requisite Organization: A Total System for Effective Managerial Organization and Managerial Leadership for the 21st Century, as well as his series of seven video tapes about Requisite Organization. The chapters in the book are organized in a manner similar to the videotapes so that they can be used together, if desired.

Chapter One describes the Basic Concepts. Chapter Two deals with Human Capability, Chapter Three describes Working Relationships and Chapter Four discusses the Organization Structure required to establish work and functions at the right level in the organization. Chapter Five explains Management Practices and Chapters Six and Seven are case studies that illustrate the process of implementing requisite managerial leadership in two different organizations. Dr. Jaques edited the first five chapters of this book for accuracy in explaining his ideas.

The theory and concepts in this book are set out as a series of propositions to be considered. The use of these Requisite Organization principles in the practice of managerial leadership results in increased productivity and profitability and provides employees with the opportunity to use their capabilities as fully as possible in a healthy environment conducive to personal growth.

Chapter 1

BASIC CONCEPTS

The practice of managerial leadership based on Requisite Organization concepts provides a systematic and science-based approach to management. These concepts, developed by Dr. Elliott Jaques, provide a comprehensive and coherent theory with an integrated set of principles that enables organizations and the people who work in them to be fully effective.

The use of Requisite Organization concepts enables organizations to:

• establish clear accountability

• establish the correct number of layers in the organization

• place roles in the right layer

• fill each role with a person capable of handling the work in the role

• provide clarity of roles and the relationships between roles

• assign tasks appropriately

• provide effective management practices

Many of the concepts that form the foundation for understanding how to achieve a requisite organization are introduced in this chapter. The first section explores organizations in which people are employed and defines the managerial hierarchy. The second section describes the all-important relationship between managers and subordinates. The third section deals with the complexity of tasks and the level of work in roles.

ASSOCIATIONS AND MANAGERIAL HIERARCHIES

More than 90% of those who work in the U.S. and most modern industrial societies do so in organizations that employ people yet, until Dr. Jaques’ work, there was no precise definition of what these employment organizations are. It is essential to have a clear understanding of employment organizations in order to